Even digitized, unprocessed sound collections, which hold important cultural artifacts such as poetry readings, story telling, speeches, oral histories, and other performances of the spoken word remain largely inaccessible.

In order to increase access to recordings of significance to the humanities, Tanya Clement at the University of Texas School of Information in collaboration with David Tcheng and Loretta Auvil at the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign have received $250,000 of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Office for the HiPSTAS Research and Development with Repositories (HRDR) project. Support for the HRDR project will further the work of HiPSTAS, which is currently being funded by an NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant to develop and evaluate a computational system for librarians and archivists for discovering and cataloging sound collections. The HRDR project will include three primary products: (1) a release of ARLO (Automated Recognition with Layered Optimization) that leverages machine learning and visualizations to augment the creation of descriptive metadata for use with a variety of repositories (such as a MySQL database, Fedora, or CONTENTdm); (2) a Drupal ARLO module for Mukurtu, an open source content management system, specifically designed for use by indigenous communities worldwide; (3) a white paper that details best practices for automatically generating descriptive metadata for spoken word digital audio collections in the humanities.

Welcome to HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship). We are very excited to have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host this Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. As part of the HiPSTAS Institute, we will host two meetings: one in May 2013 and the second in May 2014. Between the two meetings, there will be a year of virtual consultation for use cases developed by archivists, librarians, and scholars interested in developing more productive tools for advancing digital scholarship with sound collections.

This space will change as the project progresses. Please look around.

Thank you,
Tanya Clement
Assistant Professor, School of Information
University of Texas, Austin